Gametap is a one-stop-shop for emulator junkies, casual gamers and, perhaps most importantly, budget-conscious (aka. cheapskate) players who don’t have $50-60 to drop on a game that may or may not turn out to be a buggy mess.
As of this writing, Gametap has almost 1,000 games in its remarkably intuitive game library. The bulk is made up of great classics (Street Fighter II, Missile Command etc.) and not-so-great ones (Intellivision Skiing, Break Dance) for most major formats stretching back to the Atari 2600 days of yore.
They also host a slew of newer games such as Hitman: Blood Money, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. In addition, they launch original games, most notably Myst Online: Uru, the Sam & Max series, and American McGee’s future release Grimm Tales.
The service has been around a couple a years and they have since expanded to offer fun video clips, gamer leaderboards for competitive play and other neat features.
You can play a handful of the classic games for free, but to get the good stuff you need to subscribe. The monthly cost of everything is a quite reasonable $9.95.
Go to http://www.gametap.com and download one of the two clients, Lite or DeLuxe (recommended). Sign up for an account, enter your credit card info and shazam, you have your login ID and password. Fire it up, log in and try to not get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of games.
First off, the interface is very simple. At the top-center, you have the main categories; search (by name), game types (RPG, action etc.), game systems (Windows, NeoGeo), Gametap picks (recommendations) and My Playlists (for quick-jumping to favorites later).
Once you’ve chosen a main category, say game systems, you can then pick Dreamcast, and voila, you get every available game on that system in an alphabetic-scroll directory.
For example, you want to take Crazy Taxi for a spin. Click it to open an info screen with screen shots, description, instructions and download information. If you like what you see, click download. You get a time estimate and a video feed for entertainment while you wait, or you can set it to download in the background if you have something already downloaded from earlier. And yes, you can stop halfway through a 2 Gb download and resume later.
Once the game is downloaded you simply hit “play” and that’s it. Next time, you can jump straight to the game within seconds from the menu. And that’s as tough as it gets. My four-year old daughter figured out how to download the Reader Rabbit games on her own in a matter of minutes. Odds are you will too.
Of course, one key question here is: Do the games work properly? For the most part, yes. It seems the staff go to great lengths to make sure every game is fully patched and running properly on pretty much all computers.
Having butted heads with my fair share of NES, Sega and other emulators, just having a “play” button instead of jiggering with a gazillion memory settings (and still get weird graphics) is a godsend.
Strangely, the only real problem I had was with Far Cry, where an inexplicable bug kept freezing the computer to the point of needing a hard reset halfway through the Pier level. But then again, my MoBo has developed a PCIE voltage problem so I’m chalking it up to hardware problems on my part. All the other games I tried ran perfectly.
Gametap takes advantage of its online format by enabling members to socialize with likeminded around the world. Make friends, challenge them to a game and crush them mercilessly. Or make the unpleasant discovery that you don’t have half the skillz you thought you did. Either way, it’s fun to go outside the box once in a while.
As mentioned earlier, they have an extensive collection of videos featuring animated shorts, interviews with game developers, gaming tips, music and much more. Granted, it’s not what brought you to Gametap, but it sure is a nice freebie to have when you’re all fried after two hours of intense Street Fighter II button-mashing against some dork from Australia.
Is Gametap worth ten bucks a month? Absolutely. It’s the kind of service that you don’t really realize you need until you’ve signed up, but once you’re used to it, there’s no going back.
The one downside is that there are still some gaping holes in the game selection. MechWarrior, Medal of Honor, Total Annihilation and other pivotal series from gaming history would do wonders in filling in those gaps. But they keep adding dozens of new games each month, and since most of the important 8-bit and 16-bit games are already there, most new additions cover the exact era where the selection is a tad weak today.
Overall, the package is just too compelling to pass up. If you have broadband, this one is a no-brainer.
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